Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/417

grades and low grades assigned to him. Thus, for example, instructor number 4 has the high rating of 41 in the quality of his students and the low rating of — 23 in the assignment of grades. Instructor number 26, on the contrary, has the low rating of — 21 in quality of students and the high rating of 52 in grades assigned. In other words, he has a conspicuously large proportion of the students whose general scholarship is low, and to these poor students he awards a conspicuously large proportion of high grades. Many a teacher would be surprised to discover his standing on such a scale, and the college administrator who undertakes to deal with such discrepancies, through discussion with individual members of the faculty, will do well to provide himself with a quantitative presentation of the facts.

TABLE V

A Rating of Elective Classes in Williams College

I

II

I

II

1

113

0

16

2

41

2

113

0

17

1

42

3

77

27

18

— 1

56

4

41

— 23

19

— 2

6

5

39

23

20

— 4

— 11

6

39

— 21

21

— 5

89

7

24

3

22

— 7

63

8

20

49

23

— 8

59

9

17

50

24

— 14

40

10

15

34

25

— 17

95

11

13

20

26

— 21

52

12

9

41

27

— 22

89

13

7

32

28

— 30

114

14

6

58

29

— 33

66

15

5

63

30

— 40

73

Such regulation will be resented by many college teachers as an infringement on their rights. But academic freedom that allows each member of a faculty to do as he pleases in matters that reach far beyond the interests of his own department is intolerable license. As President Eliot has said:

A faculty can properly criticize the results of any professor's, or other instructor's, work as they appear in certain easily visible ways. Among such visible evidences are. . . the resort of obviously incompetent or uninterested students to his courses; examination papers of a trivial or pedantic sort; uniform high grades or uniform low grades returned by the professor; an extraordinary number of distinctions earned in his courses; or an extraordinary number of rejections and failures. These are legitimate subjects of inquiry by a faculty committee or by faculty officials, and can be dealt with by a faculty without impairing just academic freedom. The knowledge that this power of revision resides in a facility is a valuable control over individual eccentricities.

It is sometimes said that "there are usually some courses in a university which, from year to year, secure only an inferior grade of pupils, and other lines of work which, for various reasons, secure a dis-